ARTICLES ABOUT SKINHEADS BY DATE - PAGE 3

Jules Rakotondravoavy, an immigrant from Madagascar, went out late at night to buy milk for his infant daughter. As he passed a girl playing guitar in an underground walkway, he was jumped from behind and beaten for at least five minutes. Throughout the attack, the girl kept playing. A refugee from the Chechen war had planned to meet up with his Russian girlfriend at a popular meeting point near Red Square. But instead of going for a stroll with her, he was accosted and slapped by a Russian nationalist, who then stabbed him through the heart within sight of police.

Few art festivals stretch to encompass both the jazz of Louis Armstrong's and Bix Beiderbecke's and prose about '80s skinheads. But diversity is one great strength of Columbia College, the Loop school specializing in visual, media and performing arts. The five-day "The Art of Columbia College" opens Wednesday with the college big band's "Bix and Louis" concert, continues Thursday with Prof. Don De Grazia reading from the skinhead-chronicling novel "American Skin" and runs through March 4. (The 2.5-hour ARTwalk 2001, a tour of eight galleries and one museum, begins at 5:30 p.m. Thursday.

Militant Jews burned Nazi and Confederate flags in front of the federal courthouse Friday at a rally against racism. The rally was held a day after five skinheads pleaded guilty to attempting to firebomb a synagogue. The protest, organized by the Jewish Defense League, attracted about a dozen people and prompted a counterdemonstration by six men who said they were white supremacists and friends of the five neo-Nazis who pleaded guilty. The six men unfolded Confederate and Nazi flags and raised their arms in Nazi salutes.

A skinhead avoided a possible death sentence Monday by pleading guilty to murder for shooting an African immigrant at a downtown bus stop. Nathan Thill, 21, was sentenced to life without parole in the 1997 slaying of Oumar Dia. The white supremacist's first trial ended in a hung jury, and he faced a February retrial. Dia, 38, and a bystander were shot at the bus stop. Police said Thill called Dia a racial slur and asked if he was prepared to die. Jeannie VanVelkinburgh, the bystander, was hit in the spine and paralyzed as she tried to help Dia. In jailhouse interviews, Thill admitted he shot Dia and described himself as a warrior in a race war. Before sentencing, Thill said: "I grudgingly accept my life sentence . . . in order to slap the prosecution in their faces.

The newspaper story barely was noticed except by a fraction of Moscow's population. In honor of Adolf Hitler's birthday, the account said, neo-Nazi groups were threatening to kill an Asian a day in the city. Police discounted the rumors, but Asian and African students who live every day amid the dangers of racism in Russia could not be so casual. Then reports started coming in. About 20 skinheads brutally beat a couple of Asian women near the Arbat pedestrian district. A Nigerian, an Indian and a Kenyan were attacked in separate incidents.

For years, vicious bands of Moscow skinheads have been attacking foreigners of Asian and African descent. Last Saturday, a black American marine assigned to the United States Embassy there was brutally beaten at a busy outdoor market. Even before this ugly incident, the embassy had issued a warning about the growing danger of unprovoked assaults on U.S. citizens of Asian and African origin. The racist abuse of foreigners is a direct outgrowth of the rampant mistreatment of ethnic minorities in Moscow and other Russian cities.

A black American beaten by a group of skinheads in a Moscow park over the weekend is a U.S. Marine, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday, calling the attack "repulsive." The attack occurred Saturday afternoon in Fili Park in southwest Moscow at a busy outdoor market where compact discs and cassettes are sold. The victim was strolling with a female embassy translator, who is also black, when four skinheads attacked the man, police said. U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Olivia Hilton, citing privacy considerations, refused to confirm that the victim was a Marine, saying only that he had received the necessary medical attention.

A black woman attacked at a convenience store said her assailants told her they were skinheads and used a racial slur before assailing her in the latest in a string of apparently race-based crimes in Colorado. Shomie Francis, 26, of Aurora told police she was jumped by six people as she was getting some food at a 7-Eleven at about 2 a.m. on Thanksgiving. Paramedics called to the store treated her for cuts and wounds to her face. Francis said she asked the suspects if they were skinheads, they said yes and started hitting her. She couldn't say for sure how long the attack lasted.

T.J. Leyden, to hear him tell it, seemed like a pretty normal fella: a redhead with freckles, an Irish Catholic altar boy who joined the Marines, saw the world, started his own business, took clients golfing, married and had two sons, one of them with red hair and freckles too. It was lovely and normal except for Leyden's 29 neo-Nazi tattoos, half a lifetime of racist recruiting and a criminal history of raging violence toward blacks, Hispanics,...

In 1990, just before the reunification of Germany, a slender, unassuming teenager named Kay Diesner made his way from West Berlin to a house occupied by neo-Nazis in Weitlingstrasse in the east. His political views were nebulous, but he somehow felt drawn to the comradeship offered by the National Alternative, a far-Right fringe group. Those who met him recall him as deferential, certainly no fanatic. Seven years later, police encountered a different Kay Diesner. Well muscled from working out, his head shaved and with a pit bull and a pump-action shotgun as his companions, Diesner now stands charged with murder after what the police call a rampage of politically inspired violence in February.